Voices in Architectural Education: Cultural Politics and Pedagogy

This book is a unique collection of new and existing articles about progressive architectural teaching and learning. It is about restructuring architectural education--a project that defines itself within a transformative definition of society. Dialectically linking architectural education and society, the book presents authors who conceptualize architectural pedagogy within a critical analysis of the larger society, and who construct forms of teaching and learning experiences that reveal and contest professional and societal directions. The authors present a multiplicity of voices, including women, people of color, and students; voices often marginalized but crucial to a remapping of the cultural-political terrain in their struggle to make issues of gender, race, class, etc. central to a reconceptualization of architectural education and pedagogy. This anthology, then, is more than a mere list of projects and pedagogies--it is a theoretical investigation of critical practices in architectural education that engage the world in order to change it.

This book will challenge architectural educators to think consciously of their work and experiences in political and cultural terms. Insofar as architectural teachers plan instruction, determine readings, and select programs and building types for studio investigations, they are implementing a theory. The question, of course, is whether teachers are fully aware of the theoretical base of their actions. Since theory usually embodies interests grounded in societal forms of power, it has political consequences. This book sees education and pedagogy as forms of cultural politics--constructing a new terrain that will invigorate architectural pedagogy and focus discussion toward a needed architectural/educational/political project. Voices in Architectural Education will be invaluable to professors and students of architecture in both graduate and undergraduate education, as well as to practitioners of the architecture profession.